Spring Writes: Week 2

And with that, 1,000 ASA panels were born.

Haunted by writing woes? Regular goal-setting and low-grade social accountability are here to help! Also, more Beyoncé stills.

But seriously, I bought Laura Vanderkam’s What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfaston Kindle for $2.99 last night, and her advice inspired me to get up a little early this morning to crank out some writing. Historiann has written about the value of continued engagement with her research for making forward progress on a project, and I completely agree. The point of these two together is that for those who have trouble carving out time for that continued engagement, mornings might be your answer. Check out Vanderkam’s work! Claire Potter (aka Tenured Radical) is also making an effort to “write in public” with her current book project, to help demystify the process of producing scholarship. I think we can all sign onto that goal!

Here are your goals for the week:

Carly: Churn out fellowship apps, draft a CFP for the UHA, get as much admin for the semester as I can knocked out so I can devote most of my time going forward to drafting the dissertation.

Meg: Monday: work on dissertation for at least two hours in the morning–should be enough to finish research questions revision. Finish some paid work project stuff and do some class prep for my Saturday course.

Tuesday: teach. Since this is my new class, I’m going to plan to devote most of the day to prep, at least for the first few weeks of the semester, and do paid work with any time leftover in the afternoon.
Wednesday: dissertation. If my research questions are done, start on report.
Thursday: same as Tuesday.
Friday: Work on research report for at least two hours, then prep for Saturday class.
Saturday: teach.
Sunday: off (as much as possible).

Ale: Create outline for said article, especially any areas of law i need to look into or statistics (how many cases under this doctrine succeeded? how many failed? why did they fail?)

Dan: 4 poms Tuesday, and 8 Wednesday—Saturday. As far as deliverables for this week, I’m going to order one mail delivery of a fellowship app tonight, finish another to submit electronically by Friday, and finish first drafts of all of the textbook entries.

Nicole: 1) letter to send with the R and R explaining changes to journal 2) short application for summer $ I desperately 3) I need to form a very detailed outline of my 2nd empirical chapter and dredge up all the applicable raw text I’ve written for this in other doc’s, talks, ppts, etc., to line up with the outline.

Roberta: Research/writing at least 30 minutes a day.

Melanie: Finish up some fellowship apps (which includes edits to my proposal and chapter), revisit my chapter outlines, and write an article abstract.

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9 thoughts on “Spring Writes: Week 2”

I am on track so far this semester, and had a good first week. This week I am still churning out fellowship apps, plan to draft a CFP for the UHA also, and am trying to get as much admin for the semester as I can knocked out so I can devote most of my time going forward to drafting the dissertation.

I came much closer this week to hitting my goals, logging four poms on Tuesday, six on Thursday and Friday, and eight on Wednesday and Saturday. I did not, however, finish drafts of all of my textbook entries, so I’m going to try to do that this week. I was better about sticking to my pomodoro breaks, but it remains something that I need to work on. Another issue is that while I’m using things like Rosetta Stone and my MOOCs as rewards for meeting my writing goals, I’m not actually finding time at the end of the day to do those things, because I tend to want to work more at night anyway.

For the coming week, I’m going to Paris Thursday and Friday, so maybe I’ll set a goal of four poms on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, and eight on Wednesday and Saturday. I’m also going to try to get to the work earlier in the day, probably just by knocking off work as soon as I get up. If I can get that momentum, it really helps. And I want to finish these textbook entries just to get them off of my plate!

Greetings All! My name is Bunny and I am currently enrolled in an on-line Masters program for Global Health Security (this is my third course of ten). Goal for this week: post four papers, and reply to two threaded discussion questions.
Thanks for adding me!

Hi. I made far with last week’s goals but not all the way through my hopes for my dissertation empirical Ch. 2. Here are a lot of specific goals on that front this week:
1) This week I need to finish the “mucking” through to pull out key portions of the previous years of finished writing I did that’s applicable to my 2nd empirical chapter. It took a few days to get almost done with 2011 (moving to now).
2) I also need to do the “mining” of the gold in that muck by placing things in my outline and dumping out the unusable stuff into a file I can find one day.
3) I need to commit to my present outline. I’m taking a talk I gave and using more or deeper examples in the data. There are organizational questions about the whole diss. and its relation to this chapter that will keep coming up, arrg, but I will proceed with the outline I have. (Things like, how much of state policy belongs in chapters that are not “the” main state policy chapter? Do I want the state in every chapter, and to make three different points about state policy, or for it to be everywhere as part of one big point about the contradiction of state presence and absence? Arrg. Maybe moot right now. A decision that will need to get made.)
4) I need to see what’s missing once all the “mined” gems are in the outline, and go to my actual raw data to get more as needed. This is important in terms of using more current fieldwork than what I previously wrote up in some analytical way. This is what I’m most nervous about, as it has the most potential for sinkholes and quicksand (getting off task).
5) I’m going to have to pull up more on the literatures I’ve discussed too, but only to continue along with the outline. I don’t want to get lost there!!
6) I need to begin the chapter with some descriptions of representative organizations. But before knocking myself out, I have to have some reason for the features I decided to describe that fits into the rest of the chapter’s main three themes.
7) THUS: In a week I want to be well into working with finished writing of chapter 2 (you know, sentences and paragraphs that go together, transitions, coherence). I had set the goal of this draft done 2/12!
8) Unrelated to this: hopefully I can get the R and R paper back to the journal by this time next week. This is out of my hands right now.

In week three I will complete the last fellowship app that’s outstanding (I hope it is outstanding!) and finish that UHA proposal I mentioned last week. I plan to finish up a project for CENFAD that should take quite a lot of this week’s hours. And I’m getting into writing the next big drafty chunk of dissertation.